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11067706 No.11067706 [Reply] [Original]

I wasn't sure if this topic was really fitting for this board but I'll go ahead and declare it anyway, since I know there's at least some interest in these kind of things here. I'm not really here to convince you - view it more as a report.

Like most of you, I'm a very skeptical and scientifically-driven person. I used to frame my personal development and problems in contemporary psychoanalytic terms - and still do.

But recently, I was visited by what Christians identify as the Holy Spirit. Hard to describe, but to put it in non-Christian terms: something along the lines of a loving revealatory energy that curbs the evil, malevolence and sins contained within you and fills you with love, virtue and true confidence. It curbs the insecurities and desires most people, including myself, think is what make them strong and others weak. This came during Easter, after a long period, if not lifetime, of harboring evil.

I want to highlight that I've been framing most of this in a standard psychoanalytic way, and only recently discovered that this is exactly what the Christians identified years ago. I'm not prepared to call me religious or Christians yet, just how well my recent experiences match religious themes in a much deeper sense that one might expect especially if you're proudly skeptical person. And it's not vague talk that just happen to match my state. It's quite specific.

I feel like I truly "get" it now - or at least have begun to. Things that just seemed loony before. What I want you to take away from this post is that religion is not a series of historical and mythological moral lectures and accounts but much more than that. Nor is it a "life guide". Right now I'd describe it as something that understands you better than you think.

I'm reaching out to you because I want to know if there are similar stories out there or some guidance.

>> No.11067746

http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/tic/index.htm

>> No.11069340
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11069340

>>11067706
bump

>> No.11070575

>>11067706
Pray the Rosary more often when you are stressed and ask for peace. You'll be amazed by what it does once you ask sincerely. Try your best to put yourself in the mysteries of the rosary.

>> No.11070643

That's very very close to the experiences I've had, though longer and more drawn out, over the past several years. I can only gropingly describe how I feel about the possibility of a higher purpose/reality/consciousness than mine, yet somehow deeply implicated with my own purpose/reality/consciousness, and I always end up with vague and unsatisfying things like
>Somehow "faith in something higher," and in a union and communion with that something, is inherently built into the conditions of the possibility of being a freely acting, freely choosing, self-creating soul, by definition and necessarily
>Somehow "putting oneself in the service of the Good," or of its realisation, even if one doesn't yet know what the Good is, is not just an ethical-psychological possibility but an existential modality

I read in Pascal recently that only the misinformed (i.e., they've been misled by Christians who themselves don't understand) think that faith in God or in Christ is easy. If it's easy, it's not faith. The point of faith is almost like a perpetual initiation, something always just beyond one's reach that makes one reach for it and thereby transform and expand one's reach and one's whole self.

This sort of thinking, for me, clicks nicely into a lot of the "secular" (or, at least, non-Christian "spiritual") philosophy of the last two hundred years, which is all more or less founded on the Germans' conceptual articulation (or discovery?) of the idea of GROUNDS of the possibility of thinking certain things, and therefore the idea that not just thoughts but the grounds of possibility of thoughts might be changed altogether.

But I also try not to be seduced too much by how well this meshes with faith, because a lot of theology I've run into seems to be overly self-satisfied with operationalising a secularised kind of faith as a form of epistemological exercise or post-positivist thought experiment. I think grace, and maybe Christ, must actually be important in a sense that goes far beyond being a pleasant echo of recent philosophy of science.

I've also run into similar problems with many esoteric or neo-theological discourses. There is something just too tidy about process philosophy or Altizer, or many other systems that have a neat little metaphysic of how we are building or re-rebuilding God in the world. Somehow, I think this is still the un-transformed discursive intellect, presuming to reduce God to its level while thinking it has raised itself to God's level. Similar problem with all the idealist Naturphilosophs.

I would recommend William James on the Varieties of Religious Experience to anybody, and various other places where he talks about radically different conceptions of consciousness and how we really ought to suspend judgment about the nature of reality (noumenon) and ourselves (phenomenon). But James, at best, gets you a "hopeful, future-oriented mysticism," another kind of too-tidy metaphysics of faith like I just described.

>> No.11070671

>>11070643
So tldr, I think all this is valuable as propaedutic, but I am not sure to WHAT.

Also I am suspicious of traditionalists and hermeticists for the exact same reasons. All these people who re-dream Neoplatonist emanationism or some kind of neo-gnosticism, to the point that there are now meta-critiques and meta-histories of "modern gnosticism" (Voegelin obviously, more recently O'Regan) as a "deep grammar" of modern metaphysics/epistemology. All too tidy, all to prescriptive: "All is as it ever was; now go meditate."

Same problem with doctrinaire Catholics though. I can no more accept church dogma or myths than I can accept Jung's myths or Eliade's metaphysics or James' proto-Heideggerian metaphysics of authenticity or Rudolf Otto's numinous which epitomises a hundred years of comparative mythology and religionswissenschaft and turns them into a just-so story explaining all human endeavours.

No matter what, everyone seems to take the experience described by the OP - which really has to be something more than an "experience," has to be something more like a "tug" into another dimension - and turns it into the kernel of a just-so metaphysical myth for explaining AWAY the universe and the presence of faith and the numinous in that universe, rather than EXPLAINING them.